Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said that his group is working on so-called artificial general intelligence (AGI), that is, software that has human cognitive capabilities, just like the company behind it, OpenAI. ChatGPT.

“We have come to the point of view that to build the products we want to manufacture, we need to develop general intelligence,” the billionaire said in an interview with the specialized American magazine The Verge, published on Thursday (18).

“I think it’s important to convey this because many of the best researchers want to work on more ambitious problems,” he added.

The idea of ​​artificial general intelligence was popularized by California startup OpenAI, which surprised the world in late 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT, the popular generative chatbot based on AI, a large-scale language model.

Sam Altman, its director, defines artificial general intelligence as the technology that will power programs that are “generally smarter than humans.”

The concept remains confusing: “There is no consensus on what exactly artificial general intelligence means,” Nick Clegg, head of international affairs at Meta, noted Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“If you ask IT professionals, you will get a different definition for each one of them,” he added.

The emergence of generative AI over the past year has sparked fierce competition among technology giants.

Microsoft – a major investor in OpenAI – Google and Meta are developing several tools and seeking to attract the best engineers.

This technology is generating excitement, but it is also generating a huge wave of anxiety due to fears that it will lead to mass job losses or that it will multiply the power of malicious actors.

OpenAI said it wants to gradually build general artificial intelligence in order to benefit all of humanity. To do this, it relies on the use of large-scale models to detect and correct problems.

“I believe that one day we will create something that can be considered general artificial intelligence,” Altman said in Davos. “The world will have a panic attack for two weeks and then everyone will go back to normal.”